All About My Next Book: Five Sunsets : As the Bird flies... Travel, Writing, and Other Journeys

It makes me irrationally excited, scared and proud to announce today that my next book is coming! While it's my second full-length novel, it's my first contemporary romance, and can you believe it, my editors tell me it's actually a rom-com!

Nobody is more shocked than me that I've managed to pull off such a feat of being funny for most of the 400 pages that this story is told on. Also, this book - it's steamy! Spicy! Hot, hot, hot!

Announcing Five Sunsets, My Next Book!

Taking place in a luxury resort on the Greek island of Crete, Five Sunsets is a fast-paced and banter-filled steamy contemporary FM romance that features a thirteen year age-gap (she is older!), two hilariously self-obsessed siblings, one very meddling mother, one Sudoku-obsessed father, and more inappropriately named mocktails than you can count. And oh, yes, five beautiful, life-affirming, dreamy sunsets.

If you've been reading this blog for a while, or if you've read any of my previous books, the fact I'm publishing a spicy contemporary rom-com may come as a surprise. Believe me when I say it has surprised me too. I'm mentally preparing a blog post to explain how and why I started writing romance and I hope to share that soon, (although I touch on it in this recent post) but it's enough to say at this point that I have had a HUGE amount of fun writing this book. Five Sunsets has completely changed how I approach writing fiction - both technically and creatively - and I am grateful for that experience.

I'm also just really grateful for an opportunity to have created two incredibly fun, big-hearted, messy and flawed but sexy AF characters in Jenna and Marty, my two heroes who fall in love over the course of five sunsets while on holiday escaping a small mountain of problems each. Long-term readers of this blog will not be surprised I chose to set Five Sunsets on a Greek island and if you're curious, yes, Crete is where I went on my last holiday and it's where all the ideas for this story first landed in my head.

Since I finished the first draft in December last year, I've been very busy working with fantastic editors getting this book ready for your eyes and also doing so in time possibly for your own summer getaway. I will go all out there and say that this book is the ultimate beach read romance, but even if you're not heading on holiday, hopefully this will be an opportunity to mentally escape to somewhere warmer where a curvy "sexpert" journalist, Jenna, is on a mission to break her painfully long-running... ahem, dry spell, with trainee chef and college dropout Marty who - for very good reason - is looking for anything but a casual hook-up.

Intrigued? Pre-order Five Sunsets here!

And you can add it to your Goodreads shelves for later.

Or, you can sign up to join my ARC readers team and get an early proof copy of the book for review here. (This closes on Friday 13th May 2022, so be quick!)

Here Comes the Full Blurb...

Recently divorced and jobless, Jenna Forrester has escaped London to lick her wounds in the luxury resort her brother manages on the Greek island of Crete.

Out here she can forget how much she misses her work as a sex and relationships columnist, how much she misses the intimacy that was lacking in her marriage, and she can decide what she's going to do now, sexless and relationship-less, she's so poorly qualified to do the job she loved.

There's sunshine, there's her stack of erotic romance novels, and there's... Irishman Aiden "Marty" O'Martin, a man thirteen years her junior who could easily help her solve one of her problems; the absence of back-breaking, bone-shaking, delicious sex.

But trainee chef and college dropout Marty is not looking for sex. In fact, he's deliberately trying to avoid it after the year he's had.

Marty's also trying to get his life back on track. He still doesn't know how he'll get over what happened, but he hopes a free holiday could help. Even if it means waking up at dawn everyday so his father can drag him around Crete on their racing bikes. Even if it means his Ma is there – always there! – wanting to put sun cream on his back and a self-help book in his hands. Even if it means risking Carpal tunnel holding his sister's phone as she records hours of social media content for her bazillion followers.

However, when Marty sees Jenna's freckled skin glow in the sunset, everything changes. He feels something and it's not just acid reflux from one too many sugary mocktails. It's a spark, it's curiosity... it's hope.

But they only have five sunsets together. How is Marty going to make them count? And will Jenna let him?

I hope to reveal the cover very soon, so make sure you're signed up to my newsletter to see that, or make sure you're following me on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok.

Thank you all for your support and excitement for this book.